8 Ways to Buy Older Mobile Homes for Cheap

  • By Jackie Lange

A “Lonnie Deal” (named after Lonnie Scruggs) is when you buy an older mobile home for a couple thousand dollars, then resell with seller financing for 2,3,4 times more. Often you get all your money back within a few months. After that, it’s pure cash flow.
There is much less competition for mobile homes. Get 10 or 20 Lonnie Deals going, and you can kiss your day job goodbye.
In Lonnie’s books, Deals on Wheels and Making Money with Mobile Homes, he describes several ways to find older mobile homes that you can buy CHEAP.  Here were two of Lonnie’s favorite methods:

1. Driving for Dollars

Go “Driving for Dollars”

Driving through mobile home parks looking for old “For Sale” signs in the window or asking people if they know anyone who wants to sell.  (This is how I found my first mobile home deal for $1,800.)
So, how do you find the parks? Go to Google Maps. Type in your town, then mobile home park (for example: Tyler Texas Mobile Home Parks).  A list of mobile home parks will come up with their address and driving directions.
You can also see a street view of the park and surrounding area.
Yes, there will be a phone number, too. And you’ll be tempted to sit at home in your underwear calling all the parks to ask if they have any cheap mobile homes to sell.
THIS WILL NOT WORK! DO NOT CALL THE PARKS. You need to go to the parks. Take time to build a relationship with the….

2. Park Managers

The park manager is the first person to know when someone has financial problems, can’t pay their lot rent, lost their job, or is planning to move. So making friends with the park manager is essential to your mobile home investing business. You can offer to pay the manager a referral fee for each home they refer to you that you buy. They will help you sell mobile homes, too.
You’ll rarely find good mobile home deals advertised on Craigslist or other web sites. You won’t find a good mobile home deal through a real estate agent. 

You have to “get out there” and talk to people to find good mobile home deals. You cannot find mobile home deals sitting at home. 

Here are a few more sneaky ways to find good, cheap mobile homes that have worked well for me:

3.  Mobile Home Dealers

When someone wants to buy a new mobile home, the dealer will take their old mobile home in as trade. The dealer then has to move the mobile home to their lot to resell at a discount. If you tell the dealers in person that you’re interested in buying their trade-ins before they’re moved, they’ll give you a big discount.

4.  Mobile Home Movers

Mobile home movers get great deals–even free mobile homes offered to them all the time. Find out who the mobile home movers are in your area.  Let them know you’re interested in any mobile homes they can get, but you would prefer that they stay in the park.

5.  Big Players

Did you hear the story about how I bought 64 mobile homes for $400 each?  I bought them from one of the biggest mobile home players… ARC (Affordable Residential Communities). When they and other big players buy a mobile home park, they usually want to liquidate the existing park-owned homes, especially if they are older homes.
Find out if they are buying any parks in your town and if they will have any park-owned homes to liquidate. Who knows, you might get a slew of homes for $400, too!

6. Mobile Home Finance Companies

Some local banks finance mobile home purchases. Contact them to see if they have any used mobile homes they would like to liquidate. Keep in mind that they are responsible for lot rent as long as the home sits in the park, so they are motivated to sell, sell, sell.

7. Tax Sales

They don’t come up very often, but you can sometimes find great deals from your city or county tax sales. Go to the tax sale office to find out if there are any mobile homes on the list.

8. “Nice Park” Sales Departments

Some mobile home parks are getting in to the business of selling mobile homes with seller financing, too. You’ll have a hard time doing Lonnie Deals in any of those parks because the park manager has to approve your buyer–and they probably won’t.
But you can do this: When someone wants to buy a mobile home in the nice park, but they need to sell an older mobile home in a different park before they can afford the down payment on the new home, offer to buy the older mobile home.  This helps the “nice park” sell more homes.  And it helps the new buyers sell their homes faster.  Everyone wins!
Now you know how to find old mobile homes you can buy cheap.  The next step is to learn how to do a Lonnie Deal. Here’s how…
Get Deals on Wheels and Making Money with Mobile Homes by Lonnie Scruggs.

By Jackie Lange

I’ve been successfully buying, selling, leasing and investing in real estate for more than 25 YEARS and have created a “not so small” fortune from real estate. I’ve made money with anything from a $400 mobile home to a $20 million dollar mansion to an 18,000 acre ranch and everything in between! I did this all with no college education (heck, I did good to make it through high school) so don’t worry, you don’t need a PHD or years of training to make the kind of money many doctors dream about! It does not matter what’s happening with the economy. There are always opportunities to make money with real estate and people will always need a house to live in. What’s happening on Wall Street or with the government does not affect me. I’ve created my own economy and financial security. You can too!!